‘Glee’ Creator Ryan Murphy Says There Was a Spinoff. Now There Isn’t. Maybe.

A few weeks ago, “Glee” showrunner Ryan Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter that at least three core members of the cast — Lea Michele (Rachel), Chris Colfer (Kurt), and Cory Monteith (Finn) — would “graduate” and leave the show at the end of the upcoming season. The media acted like this was some giant breaking news story, even though Murphy said the exact same thing to Ryan Seacrest a month earlier.

On the heels of the Reporter interview came reports that “Glee” characters Rachel and Kurt would be getting a spin-off in which they move to New York together after graduation to pursue their dreams of Broadway stardom.

Now, in a somewhat bizarre interview with Deadline Hollywood, Murphy addresses claims by some of the show’s cast that they didn’t know this season would be their last. He says they knew because they’d all been talking about a spinoff for quite some time, but because they said what they said, now there isn’t a spinoff. But there might be later on. Maybe. Maybe not. Or something.

It’s all very roundabout. Here are four excerpts from different parts of the interview:

At the time, all three of them expressed interest [in a spinoff]. […] They were involved in the process for 3 to 4 months […] So, for any of those actors to say, ‘I found out that I was fired off the show from Twitter,’ is absolutely 100% not true.

All of us, the studio, the network, were like, ‘OK, that isn’t exactly cool,’ because we involved all three of them in that decision. So then what happened is that we decided, ‘OK, let’s not do it.’ So that’s where we are today. Maybe we’ll talk about it in April or May, but for now let’s just concentrate on making Season 3 the best that we can do.

I think what happened is Chris Colfer did an interview and the timing probably was a little bit unfortunate. I think that he was getting a lot of calls with people saying, ‘You’re fired. You’re fired.’ And all of them knew they weren’t fired, but it was an awful thing to read. And I felt for them. And they couldn’t come out and say, ‘No, we weren’t fired. We’re talking about a spin-off.’ Because we told them not to. And this has blown up. So now we’re not doing the spin-off.

Could we do a spin-off? To be quite honest with you, maybe. […] And if there’s no spin-off, then we’ll announce that there’s not. But as of now, I can tell you I’m not working on it.

Well that clears it right up. And if I’m ever granted the superpower of seeing through mud, I might even know what he just said.

Maybe Murphy shouldn’t have told anyone about the “graduations” if the actors weren’t also coached on what to say when the inevitable questions came. Now it just looks like he and the studio are petulantly taking a ball away from a kid who didn’t play with it the way they thought he should.